Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils

by Lydia Pyne

Overview

An irresistible journey of discovery, science, history, and myth making, told through the lives and afterlives of seven famous human ancestors

Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries live quietly in museum collections, there are a few that have become world-renowned celebrity personas—ambassadors of science that speak to public audiences. In Seven Skeletons, historian of science Lydia Pyne explores how seven such famous fossils of our ancestors have the social cachet they enjoy today.

Drawing from archives, museums, and interviews, Pyne builds a cultural history for each celebrity fossil—from its discovery to its afterlife in museum exhibits to its legacy in popular culture. These seven include the three-foot tall “hobbit” from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Man hoax, Peking Man, Australopithecus sediba, and Lucy—each embraced and celebrated by generations, and vivid examples of how discoveries of how our ancestors have been received, remembered, and immortalized. 

With wit and insight, Pyne brings to life each fossil, and how it is described, put on display, and shared among scientific communities and the broader public. This fascinating, endlessly entertaining book puts the impact of paleoanthropology into new context, a reminder of how our past as a species continues to affect, in astounding ways, our present culture and imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698409422
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/16/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	23 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lydia Pyne has degrees in history and anthropology and a PhD in history and philosophy of science from Arizona State University. She has participated in field and archival work in South Africa, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Iran, and the American Southwest. She has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, Nautilus, and Public Domain Review. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an avid rock climber and mountain biker.

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Lydia Pine

“Dad, I found a fossil!”

On August 15, 2008, nine-year-old Matthew Berger tagged along with his father, paleoanthropologist Dr. Lee Berger, on a field project in Malapa Nature Reserve in northern South Africa. The project was part of efforts to explore and map out known fossil sites and caves in the reserve, about forty kilometers north of Johannesburg. While puttering around the reserve with his dog, Tau, Matthew discovered what he knew to be some kind of fossil sticking out of a dark brown chunk of breccia rock. At first glance, the senior Berger thought that the fossil was simply a piece of a very, very old antelope—a common fossil in the area.

He picked up the block of rock containing the fossil and looked more closely, and realized that what he was looking at was a clavicle—a collarbone—of a hominin. He flipped the block over and saw a lower jaw encased in the same piece of breccia. “I couldn’t believe it,” Dr. Berger giddily recalled in a New York Times interview. “I took the rock, and I turned it [and] sticking out of the back of the rock was a mandible with a tooth, a canine, sticking out. And I almost died. What are the odds?”

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In April 2010, the fossils Matthew and his dad’s team discovered in excavations from Malapa were published in Science as a new fossil hominin species called Australopithecus sediba. Although the paleoanthropological community was basically in agreement that the fossils were truly spectacular specimens, the scientific name proved to be a somewhat controversial taxonomic assignment because the fossils showed primitive apelike traits as well as derived, or Homo-like, characteristics. (Many researchers thus argued that the anatomy of Sediba would be better ascribed to the genus Homo, not to Australopithecus.) The publication of the fossils was accompanied by numerous opinion pieces arguing about the best taxonomic status for the fossil—from Science to Nature to National Geographic to the New York Times.

Regardless of its taxonomy, to date, the Malapa site was undeniably a significant fossil locale, having yielded over 220 bone fragments that, when put together, can boast a total of six skeletons: a juvenile male, an adult female, and three infants that all lived around 1.9 million to 2 million years ago. When the fossil species was described in 2010, it was—and still is—tremendously exciting not only because Sediba lived during a time when both australopith species and early Homo roamed the greater African landscapes together, but also because the fossils were from multiple individuals with incredible archaeological provenience. These fossils represented an interesting time in our evolutionary history and constituted a sample of the species that was greater than just one individual—which, in turn, helps paleoanthropologists understand variation within fossil species.

Over the twentieth century, little did more to shape paleoanthropology’s emerging identity as its own scientific discipline than the fossil hominin discoveries from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Every new discovery inherently carried a certain prestige because the fossil discoveries offered the basis for creating hypotheses and explanations about what could be observed in the fossil record—new fossils could make or break definitions of species and every new discovery had the potential to rewrite the family tree. New fossils were imbued with social prestige in their original contexts—either accepted as ancestrally significant, like Peking Man, or dismissed, like the Taung Child.

As more and more fossil discoveries have entered the scientific record over the course of the last century, fossil collections are simply not as sparse as they were in earlier decades. (There are, for example, over four hundred Neanderthal individuals represented in the fossil record so far, compared with the very few specimens of the nineteenth century.) So, where does this leave twenty-first-century fossil discoveries? What would a famous fossil look like today? Flo and Homo floresiensis gave us one type of modern celebrity—contentious little hobbit that she is. The discovery of Sediba raised other questions: What historical patterns could or would other fossil discoveries follow? What historical patterns would they follow? What cultural expectations—and what scientific questions—would twenty-first century fossils now need be required to answer to?

“The dolomitic cave deposits of South Africa have yielded arguably the richest record of both hominin and mammalian evolution in Africa. Fossils were first recognized in these deposits in the early 20th century, but it was the discovery of the Taung child skull from the Buxton Limeworks in 1924 that led to the recognition of the importance of these cave sites,” Berger explained in a guide to the fossils and history of the Malapa region. Part of the reason that the Malapa specimens could catapult so quickly into the paleo limelight was due to the incredible paleoanthropological history associated with the Malapa—Sediba’s success is contingent, in no small part, upon the fossils’ South African legacy.

But Sediba’s renown is also a product of the fossil being in the right place at the right time and with a person to champion it, all the while pushing for a change in the paradigm of how paleoanthropology collects data and generates hypotheses. If the historical parallels are any indication, the life and afterlife of a fossil are made and remade by its contexts; its lasting celebrity is created over decades. While Sediba’s initial life history certainly sets it up to be The Next Big Thing, it’s not a foregone conclusion that a century from now it will still carry the same distinction it has today.

Editorial Reviews

06/13/2016
Pyne (Bookshelf), a historian and philosopher of science, superbly profiles seven fossils that she feels “tell us how scientific discoveries become written into popular culture and scientific ethos”: the “old man,” Piltdown Man, the Taung Child, Peking Man, Lucy, Flo, and Sediba. She makes clear their importance in helping people to understand both human evolution and the scientific process, while addressing larger cultural questions about the nature of celebrity and the role played by story and symbol. Pyne acknowledges that there are many fossils that play a central role in telling the story of human evolution, but she argues that these seven have acquired a cultural cachet that both add to and transcend their scientific value. Indeed, the stories associated with each fossil, the nicknames each has acquired, and the marketing arising from them have in many ways transformed paleoarchaeology as well as the popular understanding people have for evolutionary history. As Pyne notes, such stories “humanize the australophithecines, and that’s a powerful thing. It makes the fossil record accessible to us as people, not just as scientists.” Pyne’s tales complement and flesh out the well-known narratives already associated with these fossils; her work impressively blends the humanities and science to greatly enrich both. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Seven Skeletons is not simply a mixtape of paleoanthropology’s greatest hits. Instead, Ms. Pyne uses each celebrity fossil as a springboard to ask why these particular fossils have captured our attention.... [A]n important reminder that we are a self-obsessed species that loves a good hero story."—Brian Switek, The Wall Street Journal

"[Pyne's] selections highlight the different ways a fossil can achieve celebrity status. Catchy nicknames, media attention, unusual circumstances surrounding a discovery and even scandals can help.... The book provides plenty of interesting backstory for each fossil.... [A] peek at how the field of paleoanthropology itself has evolved over the last century."—Science News

“Describing human evolution through accounts of fossils that became media events might seem a publicity ploy, but science journalist Pyne pulls it off. [Pyne] casts her net... widely, adding captivating accounts of how each discovery fascinated the mass media and entered literature and popular culture.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
 
"Highly readable and an excellent title for armchair explorers with dreams of their own history-making discoveries."—Booklist

"Impressively blends the humanities and science to greatly enrich both."—Publishers Weekly

“Ever wondered how we got here, and how we think we know?  Lydia Pyne takes us on a grand romp through some high (and low) points of the scientific discovery and cultural interpretation of the human fossil record, and along the way shows just how intimately the two are intertwined.”—Ian Tattersall, author of The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution
 
“How and why do some important fossils become famous and others do not? Seven Skeletons is a story about science, but also its impact in popular culture… remind[ing] us that context matters in shaping how we think about science and the past.”—Samuel J. Redman, author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums
 
“As lively and readable as it is informative and instructive. By framing her account around the intimate history of seven individual hominid fossils, Pyne shows that paleoanthropology is about far more than dead and dry bones.”—Lukas Rieppel, Assistant Professor of History, Brown University

“A skilled historian and a lively, colorful writer, Lydia Pyne takes us beyond the headlines and into the archives, revealing intimate details of scientific investigation, discovery, marketing, and myth-making in the stories of seven of the best-known human fossils. Seven Skeletons is a sprightly, informative page-turner with a deeper message: the strange careers of human remains have much to tell us about how we use science to understand what it means to be human.”—Nathaniel Comfort, Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

From the Publisher

03/15/2016
History of science specialist Pyne, whose field and archival work have taken her from South Africa to Uzbekistan to the American Southwest, delivers an appreciation of human origins through seven distinct fossils—all with stories of their own. The three-foot-tall "hobbit" from Flores, the Neanderthal of La Chapelle, the Taung Child, the Piltdown Hoax, Peking Man, Sediba, and Lucy are skeletons important to science not only for the understanding they have yielded (even as hoaxes) but for serving to excite public interest in our ancient, ancient history. In fact, the two million-year-old Sediba fossil claims a significant following on Twitter. Way to go, Sediba.

Library Journal

★ 2016-05-14
Describing human evolution through accounts of fossils that became media events might seem a publicity ploy, but science journalist Pyne (Institute for Historical Studies/Univ. of Texas; Bookshelf, 2016, etc.) pulls it off.Neanderthal bones have always created a media sensation, but the iconic "Old Man of La Chapelle" of 1908 made the biggest up until that point. A nearly 300-page expert analysis of the skeleton, an old man with an arthritic spine, "described the Old Man as kind of caveman—not a charismatic Fred Flintstone, but a savage, shuffling troglodyte bumbling his way across glaciated Europe." This kind of description continues to influence the popular picture of Neanderthals, although scientists now conclude that they looked rather like us. Tiny "Lucy" walked upright 3 million years ago, far earlier than experts theorized. Her discoverer's account was a bestseller, and huge crowds gather whenever her tiny skeleton tours museums around the world. Nothing stirs the popular imagination more than a vanished treasure such as the priceless ancient bones of Peking Man, lost in 1941. An exception might be a dramatic hoax such as Piltdown man, a modern human skull and ape jaw that made headlines and convinced most experts for 40 years that they had found the missing link. In 2004, there came the announcement of the discovery of a 3-foot-tall primitive human who lived on a small Indonesian island until 18,000 years ago. The film Lord of the Rings won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year, so journalists, no less enraptured than scientists, named it the Hobbit. Ian Tattersall's The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack (2015) remains the best popular modern history of human evolution, but Pyne casts her net more widely, adding captivating accounts of how each discovery fascinated the mass media and entered literature and popular culture.

Kirkus Reviews